We are told Angus Taylor is a reset. Borders. Lower taxes. Australians first. One can almost hear the rustle of briefing papers being quietly recycled from 2001. It is an impressive performance. It is also one we have seen before – from this party, in this situation, wearing this particular expression of chastened discovery.

The problem is not rhetoric. It is authority. Authority used to be the meat and gristle of conservative politics. Not mere power – not the ability to pass a bill or win a vote. Authority was the quiet assumption that certain institutions carried a moral weight that did not have to be argued into existence every fortnight. Parliament commanded respect. Courts commanded deference. Honours meant something. Schools taught children what they belonged to before teaching them to suspect it. That authority did not announce itself. It was simply there, inherited and maintained.

It has not eroded by accident. Universities moved from transmitting a civilisation to interrogating it. Hierarchy was methodically redescribed as domination. Tradition was reframed as exclusion. Feminism, once a movement for legal equality, expanded into a comprehensive theory of structural power in which all inherited authority was suspect by definition. None of this required conspiracy. It required repetition, institutional capture, and the patience of people who understood that culture precedes policy.

And while this was happening, conservatives governed. They did not mount a serious intellectual defence of authority. They administered the system. They expanded the regulatory state because expansion generated careers, budgets, and influence for the people doing the expanding. They appointed judges who consistently extended the progressive settlement – welfare dependency, multicultural orthodoxy, feminism as comprehensive power theory – while the Liberals called it judicial independence and looked the other way. They treated culture as background noise and focused on GDP.

The result is a political class that has lost touch with working Australians and with the actual programme it claims to represent. I suspect there is not a Liberal in parliament who knows a single person really doing it tough – and the ones who hear about it nod sympathetically and return to their lives, because no one in their world is.

We were always prepared to overlook that. We did not elect them to slum it with the hoi polloi. We elected them because we trusted them to stand for something in return for our indulgence – freedom of speech, strong defence, sensible Aboriginal policy, free enterprise not regulatory theatre, small government with teeth, sentences that fit crimes, schools that teach civics rather than agonistics, a legitimate space for religion and for God, the family as a unit worth protecting rather than interrogating, pride in the country  they were elected to serve.

They stopped standing for those things. Which means we are left with the elitism and none of the compensation.

Taylor is now saying they stand for these things. The difficulty is that they have done diddly-squat to translate any of it into narrative, law or government programme. They have the vocabulary of conviction and the governance instincts of a department that has never once questioned its own budget. In this, they fit Paul Begala’s characterisation perfectly: politics as show business for ugly people.

Into that void, the culture war rages on, funded and institutionalised by the very apparatus conservatives declined to dismantle. Consider the Australian of the Year. Once the honour went to surgeons, scientists, explorers – people who had demonstrably done something before being celebrated for doing it. We have entered an era in which Grace Tame can be appointed Australian of the Year when most Australians had scarcely heard her name, and then use that state-conferred prestige to align herself with a movement many ordinary Australians understand as committed to Israel’s destruction. When Grace Tame stands beneath slogans historically associated with the eradication of the Jewish homeland, parents and grandparents do not experience it as a private act of conscience. They experience it as the nation’s moral authority being symbolically enlisted. That reaction is grounded in what people believe those chants mean and what they have watched those movements advocate.

When civic honours become indistinguishable from activist launch platforms, the shared moral centre thins – not because of malevolent conspiracy but because conservatives, in government, never touched the machinery that produces it. They sighed. They tutted. They moved on to the next briefing, just as we moved on from the poor ratings of The Sussan Show.

Authority in the twenty-first century is no longer simply institutional. It is performative. It attaches to conviction more readily than to office. This is why One Nation persists despite everything. Its voters trust it. They believe that if the Boadicea of the North says she will cut immigration, she will attempt to cut immigration. Trust of that kind is psychological. It attaches to the perception that a leader’s words and intentions share the same address.

Taylor promises border control. He may mean it. The difficulty is that there are no genuine Liberal strategists any more – only crusty survivors composing optimistic memoranda in R.G. Menzies House. Credibility is not rebuilt in a speech. It is rebuilt by subtraction – by actually reducing the state’s reach, by appointing people who reflect a different philosophy, by dismantling rather than merely denouncing the frameworks that produced the culture they claim to oppose.

Until that appetite is demonstrated by evidence rather than declaration, the Liberals remain what they have been: a party that campaigns like an insurgency and governs like a compliance department. They will promise to cut migration while convening a stakeholder forum on how to do so without inconveniencing the migration industry. They will condemn the demise of Australia while retaining, in careful administrative amber, every instrument contributing to the decline.

One watches the Liberal party with Sisyphean sympathy – same hill, same party, same result.

The Liberals have lost their base because they broke a covenant. Ordinary Australians did not ask to be governed by people who understood their lives and their struggles in minute detail. What they insist upon is that conservative politicians stop collaborating with socialists committed to taking the country down the road to serfdom. Simple enough.